Move over Sherlock: AI detective to crack cases

A new artificial intelligence system, visual analytics for sense-making in criminal intelligence or VALCRI, can help solve crimesPTI | Updated: May 16, 2017, 09:18 IST

The legendary crime-solving capabilities of one of literature's most immortal heroes, Sherlock Holmes, may soon find a modern-day equivalent in technology that can run through millions of police records within seconds to throw up clues and identify possibly relevant connections between different crimes.

Police in the United Kingdom, are trialling the computer system in the hope that it can help piece together what might have happened at a crime scene, science blog 'New Scientist' reported, while their counterparts in Belgium's Antwerp are testing out a version of the system too.

"Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that is the easy bit," said William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London.

"The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected," Wong said.

When an unsolved crime lands on an analyst's desk, one of the first things they have to do is search police databases for incidents that could be related based on their location, time or modus operandi, and collect details of all of the people involved.

According to the 'New Scientist', "VALCRI's main job is to help generate plausible ideas about how, when and why a crime was committed as well as who did it. It scans millions of police records, interviews, pictures, videos and more, to identify connections that it thinks are relevant. All of this is then presented on two large touchscreens for a crime analyst to interact with."

"An analyst can then say whether this is relevant or not, and VALCRI will adjust the results," said Neesha Kodagoda, also from Middlesex.

The system uses machine learning to improve its searches on the basis of such interactions with analysts, the 'New Scientist' reported. A lot of the information recorded in police reports is in side notes and descriptions, but the algorithms powering VALCRI can understand what is written - at a basic level.

UK police are currently testing VALCRI with three years' worth of real, anonymised data, totalling around 6.5 million records.